WASHINGTON — President George W. Bush's former spokesman Ari Fleischer doesn't agree with the Obama administration very often. But when it comes to the Justice Department's war on leaks of classified information, he's on the same page.

"Frankly, I think the White House has given the right answers and best answers," Fleischer says of Obama spokesman Jay Carney's defense of two ongoing leak investigations. "The problem is the answers that Jay is giving are ones that the White House press corps doesn't want to hear."

Reporters who have battled with both Republican and Democratic administrations on matters of government secrecy don't see it that way. In the wake of the Justice Department's actions, President Obama finds himself battling charges that his administration has effectively launched a war on journalists.

"There's a red line that no other administration has crossed before that the Obama administration has blown right past,'' says Josh Meyer, a former national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times and co-author of a book on the hunt for the architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The debate over leak investigations that have ensnared reporters from the Associated Press and Fox News has cast light on the often tense relationship between the government and the news media in a way that's reminiscent of the Watergate years and President Richard Nixon's enemies list.

What's at stake in the pitched battle between a president and journalists is nothing less than the government's obligation to protect Americans without trampling on the First Amendment's protection of a free press.

News organizations and media experts say the rift between administration officials and the journalists who cover them had been growing long before the Justice Department obtained AP phone records and a Fox News reporter's phone records, e-mail and other personal information as part of its effort to find out who leaked secret information.

Part of the reason has been President Obama's promise to lead a more open and transparent administration — a vow some media organizations say he has failed to meet. Now the tension between the government and the media is developing into a more serious conflict, and the strain is palpable.

"The intrusion into the whole reporting process is something we haven't seen on the kind of basis that we have here,'' says Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University in Maryland and an expert on relations between the president and the media. "I can't think of any other administration that has been following down leaks in the same way this one has."

Under Obama's watch, the Justice Department has filed six leak-related investigations, more than all other administrations combined. Those charged with crimes include two CIA officers, an FBI linguist, a State Department analyst, a National Security Agency official and a U.S. Army soldier.

Since fury erupted over the AP and Fox News incidents, the Justice Department has argued that it followed the letter of the law and secretly obtained records from reporters only after exhausting all other investigative means.

Obama himself has underscored the importance of investigative journalism in a democratic society, while stressing his legal obligation to pursue leakers of classified material. Carney, the president's spokesman and a former journalist, has acknowledged in the aftermath of the revelations that "questions surrounding these issues are legitimate."

Defenders of press freedom say the reason is clear: If sources believe their identities cannot be protected, they will not speak up.

"Ultimately, the biggest impact is in the message it sends to sources: If you talk to a journalist, we will get you," says Lucy Dalglish, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "The risk is that the public won't have access to the information it needs to make informed decisions at the ballot box about how this country should be run."

PLUGGING THE LEAKS

The latest debate centers on two classified leak investigations:

•The Justice Department obtained records this year for 20 phone lines belonging to the Associated Press. The department won't address the investigation directly, but, according to the AP, it's part of an administration effort to track down the source of a May 7, 2012, article about a foiled Yemen-based terrorist plot to bomb an airliner.

The report exposed a CIA informant inside al-Qaeda, taking a valuable asset out of play for the agency. The AP held off publishing the story until government officials indicated any sources were out of imminent danger.

Federal authorities first interviewed about 550 people, including officials who would have been aware of the informer in Yemen, and scoured the documentary record without success before secretly obtaining the AP phone records.

•In the second case, Justice Department officials obtained e-mails and phone records and tracked the movements of Fox News reporter James Rosen as part of an ongoing investigation of former State Department analyst Stephen Kim, who is charged with leaking a classified report on North Korea. The Justice Department has indicated it notified Fox's parent company, News Corp., of its subpoena of Rosen's records three years ago. Company officials said they have no record of such notification, The New York Times reported Sunday.

Perhaps most troubling to journalists, a search warrant affidavit filed in the Kim case said there was probable cause to believe Rosen was an "aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator" to a crime.

"You can't look at this and see it as anything other than an attempt to basically scare anybody from ever leaking anything ever again," NBC chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd said on air last week. "So they want to criminalize journalism, and that's what it's coming down to."

The White House refuses to comment directly about the probes involving the AP or Fox News because the investigations are ongoing. Administration officials note they aren't alone in their push to plug leaks. Republicans clamored for investigations after two intelligence leaks last year.

Thirty-one GOP senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate who leaked to the AP that the CIA had foiled a Yemen-based plot to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner. Lawmakers also raised questions about a June 2012 report in The New York Times that divulged Obama had secretly ordered sophisticated attacks on computer systems at Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities.

"The president has a responsibility as commander in chief to prevent the release of sensitive information," said one senior administration official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter. "Frankly, a lot of the discussion, public discussion, has been focused on certain instances where these are investigations that were called for by Congress, as well."

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder attend the National Peace Officers' Memorial Service at the U.S. Capitol on May 15.(Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images)

A HISTORY OF PRESIDENT-PRESS CONFLICT

Since the revelations of the AP and Fox News cases, the Justice Department has underscored that it never has charged a reporter for publishing classified material. And although Obama arguably has taken a tougher tack on leaks, the shift to a more aggressive stance dates back well before his administration.

•President Nixon's White House "plumbers" were tasked with stopping leaks of classified information to the press after The New York Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The report was a detailed look at U.S. involvement in Vietnam over the prior decades.

•In 1983, Ronald Reagan expanded the ability of the government to require employees to take lie detector tests in leak investigations.

•In 2006, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his deputies raised the possibility that journalists could be prosecuted for publishing national security information after New York Times reporter James Risen revealed the National Security Agency's surveillance of terrorist-related calls between the USA and abroad.

When the Bush administration investigated who leaked the identity of CIA Agent Valerie Plame, administration employees were asked to sign waivers releasing journalists from any obligation to keep their sources secret.

Carney was Time magazine's bureau chief at the time of the Plame affair, and one of his reporters faced the threat of jail time if he didn't reveal a source who told him that Plame was a covert operative.

But the AP and Fox News cases mark the first time the government has acknowledged seizing reporters' phone and e-mail records or monitoring a reporter's daily movements.

REPAIRING THE RIFT

In an effort to ease the strain with reporters, Obama announced last week that he had directed the Justice Department to review its guidelines for investigations that involve reporters. He instructed Attorney General Eric Holder to meet with journalists to discuss the issue. Holder is due to report back by July 12.

"I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable," Obama said.

The president called on Congress to pass a media shield law to help protect reporters from subpoenas in federal investigations. It is unlikely the law, as written, would have prevented federal prosecutors from secretly obtaining records.

Some reporters and journalism advocates are skeptical of White House efforts they see as little more than damage control.

"I'm not sure what conversation we could have that would really change the fundamental issue, which is at the end of the day … they're still empowered by law to pull records we don't want them to pull,'' says Stephen Engelberg, editor in chief of the investigative journalism organization ProPublica.

ABC News reporter Ann Compton said Obama's requirement that the Justice Department report back to him relatively quickly raises expectations for action.

"National security exceptions are to be expected, and I would imagine neither of these cases would escape that,'' said Compton, who started covering the White House during Gerald Ford's administration in the 1970s. "I took the president to mean ... that straightforward reporting should not be risky business.''

Contributing: Kevin Johnson and Richard Wolf

CLOSE

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press. The news cooperative filed a letter of protest on Monday calling the broad search of records "unprecedented." (May 13)
AP